Moralism is the barrier, not the goal

Sierra Valley, CA Superbloom

It’s a bummer that Christianity has become equated with ‘religious moralism.’ It has largely become a system that is based on behavior management and puritanical self-rightness.

But when I read the gospels, one thing is abundantly clear… Religious moralism is not what Jesus came to give us. It’s what we turned it into.

Religious experts so often tells us that - because we do/don’t do x, y, and z, we are separated from God in our sin. So, they say, we need these religious experts to help us “live out the gospel” so that we can get back on God’s good side again.

But in the gospel stories, we see Jesus eating and drinking with people who are self-aware enough to know they are flawed and limited humans with messy backstories. People who know that they don’t fit the role of a “good” church/temple-goer.

This is who Jesus dined with. The Bible calls people like this ‘sinners’.¹ In other words, he ate with people like you and me (and everyone who is willing to admit their own propensity to muck things up in a royal fashion; often without even knowing it). And in those days, eating with someone was no casual thing. It meant that you fully accepted them. You were homies, hands down.

Jesus was the friend of self-aware flawed folks. People who lived under the illusion that they were the moral superiors of the culture did not like this.

Jesus.
Was not.
Into religious moralism.

The world that Jesus came into was (and still is) steeped in it.
It was (yes, and still is) drowning in it.

Now, I know that nowadays, in our modernized world in the Northern Hemisphere, not many folks go to church. So how can I sit here and say that the world is steeped in religious moralism?

To that, I’d say that religious thinking cannot be confined to the walls of a church. Religious thinking is in all of us, even (especially?) the most passionate atheist and enlightened secularist.

Religious thinking is based on a lie. The same lie, as the origin story goes, that Adam and Eve believed in the garden. This lie says three things, in particular:

1. You are not enough as you are.

2. God is non-existent; or, if God does exist, God is withholding God’s love from you.

3. The problem you need to overcome is your imperfect humanity.

It’s obvious to see how this plays out with churched folks, but it also plays out with non-churched people. Even the most secular among us often carry a sense of not-enough-ness around in the pit of our souls. It can seem like the point of life is to make the world fit into the utopia we have in our heads (yes, that the algorithm on social media has helped us construct). We can easily fall into thinking that WE are the ones who have it right and THEY are the ones who have it wrong. Or, on the flip side of the coin, when we do fall short of our ideal way of being, we feel alone and exiled from the tribe. If you’ve ever been canceled or ousted by your friends on the grounds of your behavior, you know how this goes.

Even though we don’t go to church in these parts much anymore, religious moralism has followed us into our secular lowercase-r religions of politics, parenting, work life, health, relationships, etc.

Religious moralism is what Jesus came to abolish, not perpetuate. Christianity is the Religion that is intended to end religious thinking and moralism. Religious moralism is based on the lie that the serpent gives, not the good news that Jesus gives.

So… What if religious moralism is actually the BARRIER between us and the liberation found in Jesus.  The expectations that a lot of churched religions have given us (and the expectations that secular religions have given us) are actually dead. They lead absolutely nowhere.

We are drowning in religious thinking.
We don’t need a swim lesson right now.
We don’t need a coach shouting at us from the shore.
We need a life raft.
And we find it in the good news of Jesus.

God knows everything about you
and loves you just as you are.
This is true
will forever be true
and has always been true since the beginning of time.

This is a love that doesn’t breed complacency or licentiousness.
It’s a love that sets us free to love without obligation.
And take ourselves far less seriously than we ever have.

It’s a love that makes us into
someone we wouldn’t mind hanging out with;
the one we were born as.

1. When I say ‘Sin,’ I’m not just talking about bad behavior. When I say ‘sinner,’ I’m not just talking about those of us who do naughty or even atrocious things. Sin (capital-S Sin) is like a psycho-spiritual misalignment that we ALL have. This misalignment makes us think that we are separate from God’s love. We don’t trust that we are ontologically loved. And so we do all kinds of wild stuff and nonsense to compensate. In trying to “be good” we end up being huge jerks to our neighbors and ourselves and we justify our deeds in the name of rightness. These things are lowercase-s sins.